It was 2016, and Sarah Jessica Parker—alongside her husband, the Tony-winning actor Matthew Broderick—had been scouring the real estate market for years without any luck. But then one day Broderick spotted something promising: side-by-side brick townhouses offering a total of 14,000 square feet on West 11th Street in Manhattan. There was only one problem: The Sex and the City actress was out of town, and they had to move quickly if they wanted a shot at buying the property. Parker’s first instinct was to call Frank Selvaggi, her longtime accountant and business manager and co-founder of Altman, Greenfield & Selvaggi. Selvaggi knew her taste—and her finances—like the back of his hand. If anyone within her inner circle could help, it was he.
Selvaggi was with Broderick when he first toured the space, and he immediately saw its potential. It had versatility, old-school flair, a private garden, even an elevator. With some careful remodeling, Selvaggi knew it could be a forever-home. “I could tell it would suit their needs,” he says. Parker recalls what Selvaggi said when he called her after seeing the townhouse: “The good news is it’s amazing. The bad news is you have to buy it.”
After his tongue-in-cheek summation, Selvaggi ran the details by Anthony Bonsignore, his colleague at the firm, who had helped Selvaggi with Parker’s accounts for more than a decade. The duo calculated the total cost (including renovations, mortgage payments, utilities, and ongoing maintenance), coordinated with Parker’s investment bankers to explore available capital, factored in the prospect of selling another property she owned to help cover the cost, and gathered quotes and insights from architects, designers, and contractors. Selvaggi went through everything with Parker and Broderick in minute detail. “He counseled me,” Parker says. “He told me, ‘If we can sort out a smart way to do it, it would be a really wise purchase.’ ” Parker and Broderick inked the deal for a reported $34.5 million.
There’s a phrase that has become a mantra in the Parker-Broderick household: “Ask Frank.” For good reason: Selvaggi and Bonsignore aren’t your typical CPAs. Altman, Greenfield & Selvaggi—an accounting and business management firm for performers, writers, A-listers, and power brokers—has come to represent some of the entertainment industry’s biggest celebrities since its founding in 1986, including Greta Gerwig, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Lange, Edward Norton, Timothée Chalamet, Ashton Kutcher, and Jimmy Fallon (among hundreds of others). The firm has 180 employees spread across two offices in New York and Los Angeles. They handle more than 900 clients and help manage roughly $1 billion in income in any given year. The firm performs duties for its clientele that stretch far beyond filing taxes, a lot of which are complex, time-consuming, and often emotional—like buying a new home for tens of millions of dollars. “It’s a pretty intimate job that we do,” Bonsignore says, “in terms of understanding everything about how they spend their money.”
Selvaggi likens it to the hub of a wheel: All the spokes of their clients’ lives and careers connect to them. Despite the integral nature of what the firm offers, however, Selvaggi, a self-proclaimed introvert, has always enjoyed operating in the shadows. The firm doesn’t have a website, and this article features their first in-depth interviews. Most people outside the entertainment world don’t even know they exist, yet the financial health of some of the planet’s most famous people ride on the firm. “An actor might want to see their agent or lawyer at an event on a Tuesday night,” Selvaggi says, “but at eight in the morning they want to see their accountant at their desk.”
Selvaggi with Sarah Jessica Parker.
When you’re a celebrity raking in millions of dollars a year, managing your money—doing it properly, with an advanced plan in place—becomes paramount. And yet Altman, Greenfield & Selvaggi go further to earn their 5 percent fee, based on the client’s professional income. They oversee all of their clients’ income and expenses, every dollar that comes in and goes out, from making sure the internet bill gets paid at the vacation home, to applying for mortgages on their behalf, to filing insurance claims for medical procedures. The firm also coordinates with their clients’ managers, agents, and lawyers to make sure every detail of their financial lives is accounted for. If they have extra cash that they want to invest, the firm will introduce them to investment advisors, help them review a bank’s proposal, and calculate down to the dollar whether it’s within their spectrum of acceptable risk.
They are certified accountants, yes, but their clients see them as life managers, too. “We allow them to focus on their creative energy instead of having to deal with the minutiae of categorizing credit card charges, or putting together a board package when they’re buying an apartment, which can be cumbersome and mind-numbing,” Bonsignore says.
The firm also, of course, handles tax returns, tailoring each client’s deductions to what their work requires of them. “In order for an expense to be a deduction, it’s supposed to be ordinary and necessary,” Selvaggi says. “If you have to be in shape on TV, I’m thinking that your gym membership should be legally deductible.” But clients often don’t know which expenditures qualify as tax write-offs. A weeklong vacation in Europe during which they had one dinner with a producer? A new Mercedes-Benz that’s garaged in New York City that kinda-sorta gets used to travel to and from business engagements? A rental home in Los Angeles whose purpose is vaguely related to professional duties? “It’s not like they’re trying to do something underhanded,” Selvaggi says. “They’re just naive about what constitutes a deduction.”
And yet Selvaggi and Bonsignore always come back to the most basic financial guidance: More money should be coming in than going out, whether you make $10 million a year or $10,000 (not a hypothetical—they represent theater folks, too!). “We set up budgets for clients,” Selvaggi says. “This is what it costs you to turn the lights on every month, right? Anybody should have a good sense of what kind of money they spend, and what they need to earn in order to afford their lifestyle.”
Sometimes clients heed their advice, sometimes they don’t—and go purchase a multimillion-dollar home they might not be able to afford. “You can’t control how people spend their money,” Selvaggi says. “I can only offer them the black-and-white of a situation and tell them what I would do in that instance.” One client even asked Bonsignore to set up a Robinhood account so he could trade speculative option contracts; Bonsignore reluctantly opened the account and put money into it, but cautioned the client that the money “might not exist next week.” A lot of the time, however, clients rely on them for even the smallest purchases. Parker admits that recently, when she wanted to buy new curtains, she called Selvaggi to make sure they were within her budget. “He laughed and said, ‘Yes, you can do that,’ ” Parker says.
Often, Selvaggi and Bonsignore are all that stands between someone from amassing (and protecting) a fortune and squandering it, especially for people who become famous overnight, or those who aren’t coming from generational wealth and might not know what to do when a boatload of money falls into their lap. “Especially with younger people, I try to educate them about how their money works,” Selvaggi says. “That to me is the main part of my job, more than paying bills and doing reports.” But the firm isn’t entirely insulated from the rare difficult client. Selvaggi remembers taking on a high-profile entertainer who, in his eyes, was “iconic.” (He didn’t elaborate further on the person’s identity.) Within weeks Selvaggi was on the receiving end of long handwritten faxes, aggressive phone calls, and intense unpredictability. “I resigned 37 days later,” he says. “What was going on was way more than I ever bargained for.”
Selvaggi himself has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the past four decades, carving out a profession that didn’t previously exist and establishing himself as a trusted cornerstone of the entertainment elite. But now he says that his time as the top dog at the firm he helped create must come to an end. Selvaggi began the process of giving up his role as managing partner in 2020 (he doesn’t go into the office but still manages about a dozen clients), and Bonsignore—who looks more like a J.Crew model 15 years into retirement than a self-proclaimed “math mind” who crunches numbers all day and files tax returns every April—emerged as the logical person to step up. He even took over his boss’s large corner office, which he admits “still feels a little weird” three years later, especially after he spent so many years next door to his mentor, collaborating constantly.
And yet, despite the high stakes involved in running this type of business, Selvaggi has resolute faith that Bonsignore, a 23-year veteran at the firm, is the right steward for the empire he built. “Anthony is a machine,” Selvaggi says. “He’s really smart. He’s great with clients. And he just works his ass off.”
Frank Selvaggi barely graduated from high school. It was 1977, in the small town of Suffern, New York, and his principal informed him that if he missed one more day he wouldn’t legally be allowed to receive his diploma. The behavior that led to this situation was typical for Selvaggi who, by his own admission, was something of a burnout during his teenage years. He regularly cut class to smoke weed with his friends, and he spent his weekends in Manhattan at concerts by all the big ticket rock bands of the late ’70s. But despite his proclivities, Selvaggi didn’t miss any more classes. When he walked onto the stage at graduation, the principal said, “I’m amazed you made it out.” Selvaggi enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology and majored in accounting, a route that was recommended to the aimless teenager by his uncle. Selvaggi ultimately found a balance between partying and studying; he wanted to excel to honor his parents, who had worked hard to pay for his education. He also came to terms with his sexuality. He had known he was gay for many years, but he didn’t know how to process the fact until he and his college roommate came out to each other.
After graduating, Selvaggi had two jobs with midsize CPA firms, mainly catering to small businesses, until one day in 1982 he came across a job listing in the New York Times for a firm in Midtown that specialized in the music industry. “It never dawned on me that rock-and-roll bands needed accountants,” Selvaggi says. It was a match made in heaven for the enduring music geek (Selvaggi’s iPhone case boasts the iconic Grateful Dead logo) and, after landing the job, he began crunching numbers for members of the E Street Band, U2, and Def Leppard.
Selvaggi with Anne Hathaway and her husband Adam Shulman.
Shortly thereafter, one of the firm’s partners pulled him into his office and asked him to file the tax return for a relatively unknown 17-year-old actress who had just landed her first big television gig: Sarah Jessica Parker. She has become Selvaggi’s longest-running client, sticking with him even after becoming a household name with the success of Sex and the City. “We were experiencing achievements together in parallel,” Parker says. “He just became my person. It never would have occurred to me to be with anyone else.”
From there it snowballed. A host of young actors asked Selvaggi to file their taxes and manage their finances; many of them would blossom into the next generation of entertainment royalty. It thrust Selvaggi into a role in which he became the most important, and most referred, contact in a lot of A-listers’ Rolodexes. “Everybody was looking for somebody [to guide them], and I always said ‘Frank, Frank, Frank,’ ” Parker says. “He has been a ballast for so many people.”
In 1986 Abe Altman, Selvaggi’s boss, pitched him the idea of leaving the firm and hanging out their own shingle. Selvaggi went to his father for advice. “Not many doors open in life,” Selvaggi remembers his father telling him. “And when they do, you have to walk through them.” The two took their TV, film, and theater clients with them and focused the new firm exclusively on the entertainment industry. “We set up shop in my living room,” Altman told the New York Film Academy in 2014, adding that they had only a handful of employees. Selvaggi was 26 years old, less than a decade removed from his principal’s warning.
The company grew quickly, mainly through word of mouth and the continued growth of the film and television industry. Their client list swelled, their offerings increased, and they upgraded offices. All was well for Selvaggi professionally, but the most important milestone of those heady years came in 1988, when he met his future husband (only his second boyfriend), Bill Shea. A former advertising creative director who transitioned his skills into the nonprofit sector, Shea became the person who pushed Selvaggi even further in his career, who supported his ambitions and brought him out of his shell. Shea also developed a close friendship with Selvaggi’s protégé, Anthony Bonsignore. “Anthony and Frank are brothers from different mothers,” Shea says. “It seems that the person who should take over running the firm is Anthony, because he and Frank have very similar DNA.”
Bonsignore grew up in Westchester County in a tight-knit Italian family. It was a humble beginning. His father was raised in Knickerbocker Village, by Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, in a neighborhood where “going to college” meant doing a stint in prison. Bonsignore’s father passed down big city street smarts to his precocious son: Keep your wallet in your front pocket, separate your credit cards and cash—subtle things that prepare a kid for the world. As a teenager Bonsignore worked behind the counter at a local deli, a gig that taught him people skills. “You have to be on the fly—who’s in a mood, who’s happy, who wants to flirt, who wants to be playful—and you have to adjust and adapt to everybody’s personality,” he says.
When Bonsignore was 18 his father died. It was an arrow through the heart for the youngest of four children, his father’s only son. But Bonsignore’s mother had always been a strong woman, and his extended family was always supportive, and the family moved forward the best they could. Bonsignore studied accounting at Fordham and began working for his uncle’s small accounting firm after graduation. But he wanted more, which is how he landed at Altman, Greenfield & Selvaggi.
Selvaggi and Bonsignore quickly became close. “I was always looking for good people to support me, and who I felt I could give these clients to, where I knew that they would be in good hands,” Selvaggi says. For years they would pick the same thing for lunch at various grab-and-go joints near the office, running down the menu at Chopt before getting sick of it and moving on to sandwiches at Pret A Manger, and then again somewhere else. The business seemed to grow as their friendship deepened, with Bonsignore bringing on his own roster of clients, including director Noah Baumbach, who wrote the script for Barbie with his partner, director Greta Gerwig. Baumbach became a client in 2005, Gerwig in 2011.
“Anthony is a calm, steady presence—something one really appreciates around money—who also has a great love for the arts and what we do,” Baumbach says. “I’ve been able to have the career I’ve had in part because I’ve often taken less money up front to be able to maintain the freedom I wanted creatively, and Anthony is as excited by those projects as he is about Barbie. I never thought I’d be friends with my business manager, but life surprises you.”
Under Selvaggi’s tutelage, Bonsignore made partner in 2009 and started expanding his client list to encompass non-entertainment folk, including the painter George Condo and the author Ben Mezrich, whose books have been adapted into the movies 21, The Social Network, and Dumb Money. “I was a maniac,” Mezrich says of his younger self. “I was spending every penny that came in, living like a rock star.” After his first nonfiction book, Bringing Down the House, became a best-seller in 2002, however, Mezrich hired the firm to turn his financial life around. “Every single financial decision I’ve made since has been with Anthony’s consultation and help,” he says. “I’m a gambler deep down. I write about people who live with risk. But that’s not a healthy way to live. I want there to be someone sensible by my side.”
Sometimes the best part of the job has nothing to do with money. Bonsignore says he signed actress Dakota Johnson a decade ago because he knew “she was going to be a star.” When client and screenwriter Chris Terrio won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2013 for Argo, starring Ben Affleck, Terrio stuffed the gold statuette into a brown paper bag, took the subway to the office, and showed it to Bonsignore. “For me, it’s exciting watching people’s careers grow,” Bonsignore says. (Terrio gave Bonsignore a signed Argo poster that reads, “For Anthony, with thanks for many rescue missions.”)
Selvaggi with Matthew Broderick
Over time, Selvaggi’s guidance of Bonsignore extended beyond the office. In 2015, as Bonsignore told the New York Times, Selvaggi persuaded him to buy a pied-à-terre in Selvaggi’s Manhattan co-op apartment building, in an effort to cut down the time Bonsignore spent commuting from his home in Westchester County. “He coerced me to do it,” Bonsignore told the Times. “The next day we were in the apartment, walking through.” After spending a few summers visiting Parker’s beach house in Amagansett, on Long Island, Selvaggi purchased a tiny cottage on the same street. During renovations of the 500-square-foot getaway, he got wind of a slightly bigger house on the same street whose owner might be willing to sell. Selvaggi nabbed that house as well, and in 2017 Bonsignore offered to buy the cottage from him at a price that allowed Selvaggi to break even.
They began spending summers together, and Bonsignore describes a typical morning: “He gets up at five. I get up around 8:30. He starts calling me at 8:15, and I ignore him. Then I’ll call him around 9:15. He’ll say, ‘What time are you going to the beach?’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ At 11:30 he calls me again and he’s like, ‘I’m going to the beach.’ And I’m like, ‘All right, I’ll see you there.’ And we hang out.”
It wasn’t until recently that Bonsignore realized that Selvaggi may have been filling the void left by his father’s death. “When I lost that male figure in my life, I was kind of at a loss,” he says.
“He has the same work ethic that I do,” Selvaggi says. “I always tell people that he’s the taller, more handsome, straight version of me.” When Bonsignore’s daughter was born, 13 years ago, Selvaggi and Shea were at the hospital the next day, and Selvaggi came up with the spelling of her nickname Charlee, short for Charlize. “I’m very lucky,” Bonsignore says of his friendship with Selvaggi.
In 2020, after Covid hit and Selvaggi found himself spending more time at his antique farmhouse in North Salem, New York (an equestrian-fueled town where Bill Gates’s daughter, Jennifer Gates, owns Evergate Stables, a $15.8 million 124-acre estate), he approached the firm’s seven other partners and said it was time for him to step down from his day-to-day role at the company. “I said, ‘I want to scale back. I want to give up my managing partner responsibilities,’ ” Selvaggi says, adding that he would rather guide his clients from 30,000 feet in the air, “as opposed to it being like, ‘Frank, my cable got disconnected.’ That’s not what I want to do anymore.”
He reduced his personal client load from roughly 90 to a core dozen (including Parker, Timothée Chalamet, Anne Hathaway, and Jimmy Fallon), began working remotely from upstate or, in the summer, his house in Amagansett, and promised one of his clients that he wouldn’t cut the cord completely until he had helped oversee the construction of the client’s dream home. “I said, ‘It’s going to be a whole different world [after Covid],’ ” Selvaggi says. “And the younger guys should really be figuring out how to move the company forward.” For Bonsignore, it felt like the end of an era. “We’ve always worked in tandem, as a team, whether it’s his client or my client or a shared client,” he says. “We’d run stuff past each other. We just had this amazing friendship.”
Bonsignore has stepped into Selvaggi’s shoes, but the former protégé doesn’t feel a need to reinvent the business model—to change the niche they’ve established as the hub of the celebrity wheel. “I like the lane that we’ve always been in, and I don’t really see a reason to change it,” he says, sitting in the office his boss used to occupy. The firm’s digs are quiet and unassuming, just like their presence in the entertainment world. And yet their role as the guiding hand for some of the most famous people in that world is evidence of just how wild a ride it has been for a couple of small-town guys with CPA degrees trying to make good.
This story appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Ian Frisch is a journalist and documentary producer who lives in Brooklyn; his first book is Magic is Dead: My Journey Into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians.